World's Imperiled Fish (Global Fish Declines)

by Carl Safina, PhD

Originally published in Scientific American, November 1995, pp. 46-53.

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Darwin's predecessor Jean-Baptist de Lamarck, who is well known for his theory of the inheritance of aquired characteristics, also wrote that "Animals living in... the sea waters... are protected from the destruction of their species by man. Their multiplication is so rapid and their means of evading pursuit or traps are so great, that there is no likelihood of his being able to destroy the entire species of any of these animals." Lamarck was wrong about both evolution and fisheries. We can forgive Lamark for his inability to imagine that the human capacity to catch fish could exceed the fishes' capacity to multiply. But contemporary people, including many whose careers have focused entirely on fisheries, have committed the same error of thinking. Their mistakes have resulted in depletion, ecological imbalances, large-scale unemployment, and human impoverishment in coastal communities and around the globe. Ironically, over-emphasis on short-term fishery profit seeking has resulted in losses of billions of dollars to businesses and taxpayers, and real threats to the food supply of many people around the world. One of the most fundamental errors of approach to fisheries has been a failure to recognize that fish are wildlife-- the only wildlife still hunted on a large scale.

Because fish are taken from nature, attempts to force indefinite increases in marketplace supply eventually run into limits and can result in collapse. All regions in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific have declining catches, and in some regions where catches peaked as long ago as the early 1970s, declines have since exceeded 50 percent. Meanwhile, some of the world's greatest "inexhaustible" fishing grounds-- including the Grand Banks and Georges Bank of eastern North America-- are now largely closed following their collapse and the commercial and ecological extinction of much of their formerly dominant fauna. In 1989, the take of wild fish from the sea peaked at 82 million metric tons and has been slowly falling since.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization-- until recently a promoter of fisheries expansion (they encouraged the development of driftnetting in the 1980s, then banned it in 1991)-- has concluded that the fisheries situation "is globally non-sustainable, and major ecological and economic damage is already visible." FAO also recently asked:

"Are we then reaching in the 1990s the limits of production from 'wild' marine resources? The answer to this question seems not only affirmative, but for many resources this limit was reached decades earlier than the peak in global landings... It is important to continue to single out overfishing (and its economic counterpart, overinvestment) as the main culprit for local resource degradation over the last 50 years. Excess fleet capacity and overinvestment undermine fisheries and harm the contribution that fisheries might make to food security"

In April 1995, the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council published a report saying, "Marine biological diversity is changing, and it does matter... The diversity of life in the ocean is being dramatically altered by the rapidly increasing and potentially irreversible effects of activities associated with human population expansion... These activities have resulted in clear, serious, and widespread social, economic, and biological impacts, including: dramatic reductions in most of the preferred edible fish and shellfish species in the world's oceans, reductions or loss of species with important potential for biomedical products... vast changes in the species composition and abundance of the ecologically important animals and plants..." and "changes in the basic functioning of ecosystems." The full suite of the "most critical" problems they identified are: fishing activities, chemical and nutrient pollution, physical alterations of habitat (including deforestation, which sends sediments into rivers and coral reefs), movement of species to new parts of the globe, and global climate changes including warming and UVB.

Anyone who remains skeptical of the United Nations or the National Academy of Sciences might wish to consider some plain talk from Vaughan Anthony, a recently retired National Marine Fisheries Service scientist. Interviewed in the supremely respected journal Science, he said simply, "Any dumb fool knows there's no fish around."

The problems of the oceans are in some ways now more pressing than those on land. In a unsettling article in the venerable journal Nature in March 1995, scientists from the International Center for Living Aquatic Resource Management in Manila wrote that, "Contrary to some terrestrial systems such as rainforests, of which large undisturbed tracts still exist... the overwhelming bulk of the world's trawlable shelves are impacted by fishing, leaving few sanctuaries where biomasses and biodiversity remain high."

Why the sudden widespread concern in just the last few years? In the past, changes in particular fisheries have often been attributed to the great natural variability in the oceans' vast and complex systems. But the problems facing the world's fisheries have lately become so widespread and acute that the trend they represent now stands out as obvious and undeniable.

How did this happen? In the 1950s and 60s, an explosion of fishing technologies occurred as fishing people adapted military technologies to hunting in the oceans. Radar allowed boats to fish and navigate in total fog, and sonar made it possible to see schools of fish deep under the oceans' opaque blanket. Electronic navigation such as "LORAN" and satellite positioning systems turned the trackless sea into a grid where vessels could return to within fifty feet of a chosen location, such as fish gathering and breeding sites. Ships can now receive, via fax, satellite-originated maps of water temperature fronts, indicating where fish will be traveling. Some fishing vessels also employ aircraft to spot fish.

Many industrialized fishing vessels are floating factories deploying fishing gear of enormous proportion: Longlines eighty miles long with thousands of baited hooks, driftnets forty miles long (still in use by some countries, in defiance of a mostly-successful global ban), and bag-shaped trawl nets large enough to engulf twelve Boeing 747 jetliners. Pressure from industrial fishing is so great that 80 to 90 percent of the fish in some populations are removed each year.

For the past two decades, the fishing industry countered loss of preferred fish by switching to new species of lower value, usually lower in the food web. During the 1980s, the five species that made up nearly thirty percent of the world fish catch by weight were of such low-value that they accounted for only 6 percent of the monetary value. And now there are virtually no new marine species that can be exploited economically.

Economic and Social Factors

If fish and the fishing industry are in such trouble, why are fish so available and-- for Americans-- affordable? Actually, seafood prices have risen faster than those for other meats. But further price increases are slowed by imports from distant sources, by the act of overfishing itself (by keeping supplies high prior to depletion), and by aquaculture in response to destruction of natural systems. For instance, the fall of shrimp prices is largely due to construction of shrimp farms following depletion of many wild shrimp populations, and constructing the farms themselves has destroyed nearly half the world's mangrove nursery habitat for wild shrimp and fish. When fish prices rise to the point where they surpass other sources of comparable-quality food, the continued rise in fish prices is constrained.

But no law says fisheries need to be profitable. To catch 70 billion dollars worth of fish, fisheries spend $92 billion and incur total costs of $124 billion per year. Subsidies fill the deficits. Between 1983 and 1993, European support for its fisheries rose thirteen hundred percent, from eighty million to five hundred and eighty million dollars. Such massive subsidies arise from governments' efforts to preserve employment in response to the general plight of the fisheries. Kinds of subsidies include fuel tax exemptions, price controls, low interest loans, and outright grants for gear or infrastructure.

Subsidized incentives have helped make it easy for investors to build more fishing power than the resources would support. There now exists a great disparity between what the oceans can make and what the fishing fleets can take. Between 1970 and 1990, the world's industrialized fishing fleet increased at twice the rate of the catch. It doubled in number and tonnage, until the fleets of the world had twice the fishing power needed to catch what the oceans can produce. This is called overcapitalization. Ironically, if they hadn't grown at all, they would have been able to catch the same number of fish.

Depletion generally follows overcapitalization, and profitability dives into the red, reducing the value of boats on the market. Unable to sell out without major financial losses, the boats are forced to keep fishing to pay off loans. This increases political pressure on fish and on managers not to reduce allowable takes. And this pattern leads to what Canadian marine specialist Lennox Hinds refers to as the "endless commissions of inquiry into the reasons for stock failures in developed countries." A United Nations report notes that "Current world fleet cost cannot be matched by revenues at any level of effort," and that, "As the opportunities for an increased catch from fishery resources have declined considerably, a continuation of high subsidies can only lead to greater and greater economic distress as well as further depletion."

Reinstating balance, profitability, and the employment potential of fisheries will require reduction in fishing power and the rebuilding of the fish populations. One study by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service found that the profitability of the yellowtail flounder fishery could increase from zero to six million dollars by removing over a hundred boats. Potential benefits to the U.S. gross domestic product of increasing fishing productivity from its current state to the long-term potential sustainable yield amount to $8 billion and 300,000 jobs.

Further increases in employment while reducing pressure on fish could be achieved by directing investment away from industrialized, highly mechanized ships and toward smaller boats with larger crews. Per million dollars of investment, industrial-scale fishing operations employ one to five persons, while small-scale fisheries employ between sixty and three thousand persons. The industrialization of fishing threatens tens of millions of jobs in the small-scale fishing sector, both by depleting fish along distant coasts where many subsistence-level people live, and by drastically reducing direct employment. (Fifty percent of the world landings come from small-scale fisheries, and most of their catch is used for direct human consumption rather than animal feed.)

Fishing accounts for only about one percent of the global economy. But on a regional basis, marine fishing contributes enormously to human survival. Marine fisheries contribute more of the world's animal protein than beef, poultry, or any other kind of domesticated or wild animals. In Asia, more than one billion people rely on fish as their main source of animal protein. In Southeast Asia, more than 5 million people fish full time. In northern Chile, forty percent of the population fishes. In Newfoundland, nearly all of the people fished or serviced the fishing industry until the cod collapse in the early 1990s closed the fishery. Worldwide, about 200 million people depend on fishing for their livelihoods. Because fishing generally does not require land ownership and because access is generally open, it has been termed the "employer of last resort" in the developing world; an occupation to turn to when there are no options.

The Population Factor

While the catch of wild marine fish is declining worldwide, each year the number of people in the world increases by an amount equal to the population of Mexico. Maintaining present average consumption levels in the face of human population growth will require approximately twenty million additional tons of seafood by 2010. Aquacultural production-- fish farming-- will have to double in the next fifteen years and wild fisheries will have to be significantly increased. Wild fishery landings can now be increased only through conservation that allows rebuilding of depleted fish communities (which will entail restraint in the face of increasing demand), and through technological innovations to increase use of bycatch and to produce human food from fish species that currently go to feed livestock. Even if all the fish that now go to animal feeds-- a third of the world catch-- were used for direct human consumption, it would maintain average consumption rates for only about twenty years. Improved conservation of wild-caught fish would not be able to keep pace with ongoing population growth. We will therefore witness in the next few decades the heretofore unthinkable exhaustion of the oceans' ability to naturally satisfy humanity's demand for seafood.

Aquaculture will be increasingly looked to to fill the gap between what nature can supply and the hunger of people. Since aquaculture entails land ownership, and focuses much of its production on high-value fish and shrimp for export to developed countries, it is by no means clear that increasing aquaculture would translate into more food for hungry people.

Aquaculture faces challenges of its own. One increasing problem for aquaculture will be clean water. Aquaculture can both cause and be affected by water pollution. Half the people of the world live within about sixty miles of the coasts. In China, coastal population density is three times the national average. This affects quality of water available for aquaculture. Worldwide mollusk production has already stagnated because of water quality problems, according to FAO. Some of aquaculture's most valuable products cannot currently be bred in captivity, and are raised from wild-caught fry, but fry are getting scarce for some species because the wild fish are declining.

Management Problems

Great difficulties arise in putting scientific information into policies, and then translating intelligent policies into practice. In one of their reports, the Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that "The numerous national and international stock assessments done in past years have, for the most part, been disregarded by managers and policymakers." Where limits have been set, some fishermen have not adhered to them. From 1986 to 1992, distant water fleets fishing on the high seas portion of the Grand Banks off Canada removed 16 times the quotas that had been set for cod, flounders, and redfish by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization. When Canadians seized a Spanish boat off the Grand Banks, they found two sets of log books-- one recording true operations and one faked for reporting to authorities. They also found nets with illegally small mesh lined with even smaller mesh, and 350 tons of juvenile Greenland halibut. A Canadian official reported, "None of the fish found on board are of a size capable of reproduction."

Though the United Nations reports that about seventy percent of the world's edible fish, crustaceans, and mollusks are in urgent need of managed conservation, no country can be termed generally successful in fisheries management, and international cooperation has been very difficult to achieve. If a country does not like the restrictions of an agreement, it can ignore them. Italy and France ignored the United Nations' global ban on large-scale drift nets. Iceland has quit the International Whaling Commission. Japan's hunting of minke whales, ostensibly for scientific purposes, supplies meat that is sold for food and maintains a market that supports illegal whaling worldwide.

Innocent Bystanders

Virtually every kind of fishery catches unintended, unwanted creatures that, collectively, are known as bycatch or bykill. In the world's fisheries one out of every four animals caught, or about one third of the landed catch, is unwanted and discarded.

Bycatch includes non-target fish species, young fishes too small to sell, seabirds, marine mammals, and other creatures. In 1990, high seas driftnetters tangled 42 million non-target animals, including diving seabirds and mammals. Such massive losses prompted the United Nations to enact a global ban on using large-scale driftnets.

In coastal areas, large numbers of small dolphins and seals are caught in fishing nets set near the bottom. For several mammals, including the baiji of east Asia, the Mexican vaquita (world's smallest dolphin), Hector's dolphins in the New Zealand region, and the Mediterranean monk seal, interactions with fisheries puts the species' survival at risk. Seabirds are also affected. Work by Rosemary Gales shows that in the Southern Hemisphere over 40,000 albatrosses are killed each year when they are hooked and drowned after grabbing bait on longlines being set for bluefin tuna. This level of mortality is endangering six of the 14 species of these great wandering seabirds.

In some fisheries, bycatch exceeds target catch. In the Bering Sea, the area with the world's highest bykill (9 million metric tons), sixteen million red king crabs were discarded in 1992, while only about three million were kept. Shrimp trawlers have more bykill than any other type of fishing gear, and account for over a third of the global total. Discarded creatures outnumber shrimp catch by 128 to 830 percent. Bykill of sea turtles in shrimp trawls has been the largest source of mortality to adult sea turtles in the U. S., estimated by the National Research Council at around 45,000 endangered and threatened turtles annually. Fortunately, turtle deaths can be reduced by recently mandated "turtle excluder devices" that shunt the creatures out a trap door. But in the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery, 12 million juvenile snappers and 2,800 tons of sharks are discarded annually. Worldwide, about six million sharks are discarded annually-- half the sharks caught. Recent studies indicate that much bycatch goes unreported.

Waste is not the only issue in bycatch, and using everything caught would not fix the biological effects of catching huge numbers of fish that are often very young, as well as seabirds, turtles, dolphins and other mammals.

Future Options

Clearly one of the most important things that could be done for overfishing and bycatch is to remove the subsidies for fisheries that would otherwise be financially incapable of existing off of the oceans' wildlife, but are now quite capable of depleting it. Small-scale fisheries-- which can employ more people with less ecological harm-- have been terribly neglected by governments, aid agencies, and investors.

The state of the world's fisheries is not good, but there are also reasons for optimism. For one, although our scientific knowledge is still developing, we know enough about human-induced problems to understand how they might be rectified. Where fishes have been protected they have rebounded. The resurgence of striped bass on the east coast of the U. S. is probably the best example in the world of a species that was allowed to come back from severe depletion by tough management and an intelligent rebuilding plan. Also, the United Nations has been making historic progress this year toward new conservation agreements dealing with high seas fishing. Such measures are important first steps toward a vision of a sane and sustainable future for life in the world's oceans.

Further Reading

National Research Council, Committee on Biological Diversity in Marine Systems. 1995. Understanding Marine Biodiversity. National Academy Press. Washington, D. C.

FAO 1995. The state of world fisheries and aquaculture. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Rome. 57 pp.

Safina, C. 1994. Where Have All The Fishes Gone? Issues in Science and Technology. 10:(Spring) 37-43.

Safina, C. 1993. Bluefin Tuna in the West Atlantic: Negligent Management, and the Making of an Endangered Species. Conservation Biology 7:229-234.